Chapter 2: THE EMBATTLED DOMINANCE OF ENGLISH IN THE UNITED STATES.

This chapter presents an essay by U.S. scholar Allen Walker Read describing his observations about the process of assimilation completed by Dutch and Danes in his native Iowa in relation to linguistics. This essay was originally presented at the Annual Foreign Language Conference in 1978. As speakers of English pushed the frontier westward, and especially southwestward, in the 1820s and 1830s, they came into collision with speakers of Spanish. The later waves of immigration have also brought their influence on American English. In 1923 the state legislatures of Illinois and Minnesota considered the adoption of an official national language. In 1929, scholars began to assess the American linguistics situation in the light of the famous substratum theory.